Nvidia Completes Acquisition of Icera, Ready to Build-in Modems into Tegra

From X-bit Labs: Nvidia Corp. on Monday announced today that it had completed its $367 million cash acquisition of Icera, a developer of wireless modems for 3G and 4G cellular phones and tablets. Icera is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Nvidia operating under the Icera trade name. With the acquisition, the company will be able to sell both application and baseband processors.

"This is a significant step forward in Nvidia’s strategy to be the processor company for the post-PC era. Over time this deal will give us a more complete and fully optimized mobile platform, immediately opens the door to the fast-growing baseband processor market, and brings a talent-packed team to Nvidia," said Phil Carmack, senior vice president of Nvidia’s mobile business unit.

With the addition of Icera, NVIDIA now offers the two main processors used in smartphones - the applications processor, in the form of the Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip, and the baseband processor, based on Icera technology. The combined offerings will help OEM customers improve their time to market and deliver the requirements of next-generation mobile computing, while approximately doubling Nvidia's revenue opportunity within each mobile device.

According to Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, the company will initially offer application and baseband processors separately, but will consider their integration in order to address the broad market of inexpensive smart phones.

Icera’s baseband and RF technologies span 2G, 3G and 4G networks.

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